I might add that computers which, by nature of their hardware configuration, are more difficult to maintain (trouble incidents per hour of use) should be ripe candidates for replacement.
I am beginning to find it difficult to keep clients computers completely up to date.
Welcome to the club.
I don't think there's any way around this issue.
Vendor updates (whether paid-for subscriptions from Microsoft, Red Hat, or beneath the pond-scum from adware spyware companies) probably haven't been completely tested for your corporate environment.
You need to have a person or an organization committed to testing the latest updates in a lab environment before they are more widely deployed to check for the inevitable laws of unintended side effects.
Yes, it hurts when you recommend that a rare swan be saved and nobody listens, but it's likely you don't have any clue what the trade-off would be.
Your point is valid, that we do not possess precise information about the trade-offs of certain decisions (eg, continue logging in old-growth forests vs. effect on those ecosystems). But whitewashing the language of critical reports is not going to further the cause of improving the precision of what we know. The contrary is true.
The main problem is not just that advocates of one particular choice (usually involving the economic well-being of ME and MY_INDUSTRY trading off against some more diffuse, hard-to-measure and potentially severe long-term costs to the public) have great influence on policy-making through financial channels, but that these advocates are attempting to actually bias the raw reports that would potentially improve the situation about things we're trying to find out about.
Don't get me wrong: this kind of strong-arm advocacy would be just as bad done from the left as from the right (which just happens to be where it is happening now).
For example, although I tend to agree with a policy that is somewhat leftward of the current U.S. federal government, that does not mean I would condone policy makers attempting to whitewash the trade-offs that went counter to my preferred policy.
For example, an economic impact statement concluding that the livelihood and economic well-being of loggers and their families would be severely impacted by an abrupt and total moratorium on old-growth logging should be evaluated as a data point. Advocates of a moratorium should not whitewash the language, watering down the conclusions in an effort to promote their cause.
Likewise, people advocating a rape of the environment and "removal of burdensome red-tape regulatory bureaucracy" should not try to whitewash the language of scientific reports.
It reflects poorly on the methods and character of the policy makers, and it cheapens and sets back the cause of dispassionate scientific study that we so desperately need to help in formulating rational policy.
...so long as users are able to use pirated copies of Windows.
Not clamping down on piracy in the developing world ought to be part of Microsoft's strategic plan.
Their best long term scenario would be to keep the existing market base and to grow the number of Windows users in the developing world using differential pricing: either officially, as in the lower-cost Thai version of Windows, or unofficially, as in turning a blind eye toward piracy.
Later, after TCPA is introduced into the latest versions of Windows, there will be plenty of opportunity for cracking down on piracy and other revenue enhancement strategies that are not available today.
They also didn't haevteh means (nor apparently the will) to develop new weapons.
The Fog of War is well worth seeing. No excuse now that it is available as a DVD rental.
On one of the "Secrets of WW2" programs that periodically plays on the History Channel, there are some very interesting stories about Japanese-made submarines capable of launching folding-wing aircraft. Their first mission - to go bomb the Panama canal - was cut short just as they were starting their mission during the closing days of WW2 prompted by the atomic bombs.
Having cheap Dell boxes running Windows admin'd by MCSE's be my NFS server instead of Sun enterprise boxes by a Unix admin with years of experience?
I can see that working really well, as long as your objective is to make life more miserable for your UNIX users in an effort to encourage them to switch to Windows for Everything:)
I love Linux, I use Linux and ultimately would like to see it more widespread.
But premature roll-out would be a Bad Thing.
The Linux community enjoys a better reputation for security, robustness, etc. due in no small part because the current user base is more knowledgeable technically.
Recently, I was listening to a computer help radio call-in show that gave me an idea of what you have out there in the retail marketplace. I swear that anyone with a network connection should be required to get a Network User's License just like a Driver's License, with mandatory testing, and more stringent testing depending on the speed of the connection.
User:"Yeah, I'm thinking of selling my old computer and I'd like to remove all the personal files from it before I sell it. What do I need to do?"
You make more money by producing commercial software than doing contract work.
Well, Gates makes more money.
But it's only because of an artificial scarcity that permits him to charge prices much higher than what would prevail in a truly competitive marketplace.
Any economist will tell you that this kind of mechanism is tantamount to a tax and decreases the efficiency of the overall economy. It increases the cost of doing business a little bit for everyone that must pay the tax. Employing more high powered software engineers might be an admirable goal and certainly many talented people are employed by Microsoft.
But once you admit you're into a policy of taxing and encouraging advanced work, then the question arises:
Why not just let the government do it?
The governemnt already has a mandate to tax and to produce things for the common good. Indeed, much of free and open source software is a result of various government investments into research.
Gate's company effectively has a mandate to tax and to produce new things to increase shareholder value for MSFT, which is a much more limited objective than improving the "public good", no matter the words he uses to describe what he does.
Here's a challenge for you: create a Firefox plugin that automagically re-writes ugly old html that breaks when rendered at larger magnifications (fonts and text boxes magnifying at different rates, etc.).
Alternatively, have a plug-in that helps enhance the text-based browsers for people that are blind or have some disability that prevents them from fully enjoying sites that happen to have good content and poor presentation.
If it's really good at nice-ifying cruddy html, then Firefox might become a common tool for web site developers that want to create the best possible site.
After all, if people have purchased the software and it keeps running, why buy anything more? If it runs well enough, why not just buy support when you need it instead of with an indefinitely long contract?
You can say that if the software company's product quality is sufficiently low that future returns will be guaranteed. But that's only true if there are no competitors with a higher quality equivalent (and, yes, you'll notice profitably comfortable footdragging going on in certain market segments).
Mostly you have to constantly increase quality, increase features, decrease the price and decrease bugs. Ultimately, you'll have created a product that's so close to perfect that people will be happy to sit with it and not "upgrade". That is, you better find a different line of business than coming out with Product++.
So how about this wild ass attempt for an explanation:
Is dtrace simply a way of inserting wrapped, more-instrumented system calls to replace the standard ones, on the fly, perhaps using the same concepts as dynamic loaded libraries?
[I'm accustomed to memory debuggers that work by substituting their own heavily instrumented wrapper versions of malloc() for the vanilla ones.]
The information to which people are exposed (the largest media outlets) is typically devoid of meaningful rational content and unbiased evaluation of different alternatives.
Either you have to open up media access so that people can be exposed to many more opinions, or else you have to educate people early enough to exercise some effort to exercise responsibility to actively go and seek out alternative sources of information.
Or else accept that we are mostly a herd.
Here at the Coca-Cola sponsored high school we're quite content with dumb-enough kids "learning" to purchase our products from the TV that we control.
who fought so vigorously in the past against such "Communist" practices
Right wing ideologues are seduced by authoritarianism just as much as the old Stalinist left ever was.
What the right really feared about "Communism" was the attack on property rights of people who owned a lot of property; the concern for civils rights was a facade.
Now, with the Republicans abandoning fiscal conservatism (cf. latest budget deficit numbers), it's hard to find much of anything left to like about them anymore.
The problem is that a nuclear weapon needs an enormous number of things to be 'just so' before it'll go bang.
And then it's basically all done. Except waiting for the radioactive dust to clear.
But the Bio Energizer Bunny keeps going and going and going.
A biological organism that can replicate will keep eating and replicating until the world is depleted of food sources, or it becomes a food source for something equally voracious, or it re-evolves into something different.
Humanity has been one of the most significant organisms to cover the globe lately, mostly due to intelligence and social organization. It would be most ironic if that same intelligence and social organization gave rise to a new species, gray goo or whatever, that ultimately displaced humanity.
Had Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson exercised a little more restraint in his emotional venting and the Justice Department actually gone through with a breakup into smaller companies that really compete, those companies, in aggregate, might well be doing much better than the whole of Microsoft is right now.
And the reality is that, very often, choosing Microsoft solutions are locally optimal. Given that you have an existing infrastructure of Microsoft products and given that most of your employees are familiar with these products (quirks and all), the incremental best next move is more Microsoft products.
And most decision makers are heavily swayed by the here and now and what the impact will be on the bottom line of next quarter's results.
But if you start to look at hidden costs in terms of downtime, of vendor lock-in, and the rate at which Microsoft will actually deliver those new products as part of your SA investment, the cost of extra dedicated servers, server admins, desktop support techs, etc., then the long term optimum is pointing away from Microsoft and towards free and open source software solutions.
It takes a courageous manager to risk a couple of quarters of adaptation and user retraining for the better long term solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Feh, heretical mixing of SI and English units.
My car gets 34 420 977 756 inverse acres.
Excellent starting point.
I might add that computers which, by nature of their hardware configuration, are more difficult to maintain (trouble incidents per hour of use) should be ripe candidates for replacement.
I am beginning to find it difficult to keep clients computers completely up to date.
Welcome to the club.
I don't think there's any way around this issue.
Vendor updates (whether paid-for subscriptions from Microsoft, Red Hat, or beneath the pond-scum from adware spyware companies) probably haven't been completely tested for your corporate environment.
You need to have a person or an organization committed to testing the latest updates in a lab environment before they are more widely deployed to check for the inevitable laws of unintended side effects.
The Washington Times says
You mean the newspaper owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the man who was recently coronated on Capitol Hill [entertaining account] in the presence of a number of Congressmen?
not one that makes stupid decisions and holds 96% of desktop marketshare.
The decisions of any company that maintains a 96% hold of a market can't be all stupid.
Yes, it hurts when you recommend that a rare swan be saved and nobody listens, but it's likely you don't have any clue what the trade-off would be.
Your point is valid, that we do not possess precise information about the trade-offs of certain decisions (eg, continue logging in old-growth forests vs. effect on those ecosystems). But whitewashing the language of critical reports is not going to further the cause of improving the precision of what we know. The contrary is true.
The main problem is not just that advocates of one particular choice (usually involving the economic well-being of ME and MY_INDUSTRY trading off against some more diffuse, hard-to-measure and potentially severe long-term costs to the public) have great influence on policy-making through financial channels, but that these advocates are attempting to actually bias the raw reports that would potentially improve the situation about things we're trying to find out about.
Don't get me wrong: this kind of strong-arm advocacy would be just as bad done from the left as from the right (which just happens to be where it is happening now).
For example, although I tend to agree with a policy that is somewhat leftward of the current U.S. federal government, that does not mean I would condone policy makers attempting to whitewash the trade-offs that went counter to my preferred policy.
For example, an economic impact statement concluding that the livelihood and economic well-being of loggers and their families would be severely impacted by an abrupt and total moratorium on old-growth logging should be evaluated as a data point. Advocates of a moratorium should not whitewash the language, watering down the conclusions in an effort to promote their cause.
Likewise, people advocating a rape of the environment and "removal of burdensome red-tape regulatory bureaucracy" should not try to whitewash the language of scientific reports.
It reflects poorly on the methods and character of the policy makers, and it cheapens and sets back the cause of dispassionate scientific study that we so desperately need to help in formulating rational policy.
Could this be a real attempt to gain a foothold before any of the other distributors do?
No, because other companies like HP and IBM, just to name a couple, have been selling and supporting Linux workstations for some time already.
...so long as users are able to use pirated copies of Windows.
Not clamping down on piracy in the developing world ought to be part of Microsoft's strategic plan.
Their best long term scenario would be to keep the existing market base and to grow the number of Windows users in the developing world using differential pricing: either officially, as in the lower-cost Thai version of Windows, or unofficially, as in turning a blind eye toward piracy.
Later, after TCPA is introduced into the latest versions of Windows, there will be plenty of opportunity for cracking down on piracy and other revenue enhancement strategies that are not available today.
if you want to find out about "redundancy" find out what they do in the military.
Cost is another matter....
They also didn't haevteh means (nor apparently the will) to develop new weapons.
The Fog of War is well worth seeing. No excuse now that it is available as a DVD rental.
On one of the "Secrets of WW2" programs that periodically plays on the History Channel, there are some very interesting stories about Japanese-made submarines capable of launching folding-wing aircraft. Their first mission - to go bomb the Panama canal - was cut short just as they were starting their mission during the closing days of WW2 prompted by the atomic bombs.
Having cheap Dell boxes running Windows admin'd by MCSE's be my NFS server instead of Sun enterprise boxes by a Unix admin with years of experience?
I can see that working really well, as long as your objective is to make life more miserable for your UNIX users in an effort to encourage them to switch to Windows for Everything:)
I love Linux, I use Linux and ultimately would like to see it more widespread.
But premature roll-out would be a Bad Thing.
The Linux community enjoys a better reputation for security, robustness, etc. due in no small part because the current user base is more knowledgeable technically.
Recently, I was listening to a computer help radio call-in show that gave me an idea of what you have out there in the retail marketplace. I swear that anyone with a network connection should be required to get a Network User's License just like a Driver's License, with mandatory testing, and more stringent testing depending on the speed of the connection.
User:"Yeah, I'm thinking of selling my old computer and I'd like to remove all the personal files from it before I sell it. What do I need to do?"
Tech1:"What operating system are you running?"
User:[pause...2...3...4]
Tech1:"Are you running Windows 98, XP...?"
User:[pause...2...3...4]..uhhh...we're running AOL....?"
Tech1:"Why don't you just bring into the shop? We can take care of it for you for a reasonable amount."
You make more money by producing commercial software than doing contract work.
Well, Gates makes more money.
But it's only because of an artificial scarcity that permits him to charge prices much higher than what would prevail in a truly competitive marketplace.
Any economist will tell you that this kind of mechanism is tantamount to a tax and decreases the efficiency of the overall economy. It increases the cost of doing business a little bit for everyone that must pay the tax. Employing more high powered software engineers might be an admirable goal and certainly many talented people are employed by Microsoft.
But once you admit you're into a policy of taxing and encouraging advanced work, then the question arises:
The governemnt already has a mandate to tax and to produce things for the common good. Indeed, much of free and open source software is a result of various government investments into research.Gate's company effectively has a mandate to tax and to produce new things to increase shareholder value for MSFT, which is a much more limited objective than improving the "public good", no matter the words he uses to describe what he does.
Here's a challenge for you: create a Firefox plugin that automagically re-writes ugly old html that breaks when rendered at larger magnifications (fonts and text boxes magnifying at different rates, etc.).
Alternatively, have a plug-in that helps enhance the text-based browsers for people that are blind or have some disability that prevents them from fully enjoying sites that happen to have good content and poor presentation.
If it's really good at nice-ifying cruddy html, then Firefox might become a common tool for web site developers that want to create the best possible site.
Seems logical.
After all, if people have purchased the software and it keeps running, why buy anything more? If it runs well enough, why not just buy support when you need it instead of with an indefinitely long contract?
You can say that if the software company's product quality is sufficiently low that future returns will be guaranteed. But that's only true if there are no competitors with a higher quality equivalent (and, yes, you'll notice profitably comfortable footdragging going on in certain market segments).
Mostly you have to constantly increase quality, increase features, decrease the price and decrease bugs. Ultimately, you'll have created a product that's so close to perfect that people will be happy to sit with it and not "upgrade". That is, you better find a different line of business than coming out with Product++.
I love those "Cashless ATMs" and "Internet Terminal" schemes they offer on TV.
I especially love the ones that show
A two second video clip is worth a million words.
exactly where they would be classified as the underdog.
No, certainly not in Windows OS or Office, which have been completely and utterly conquered and exploited and where the concept is a laughingstock.
It's the new markets where Microsoft is just entering that they are the underdog.
So how about this wild ass attempt for an explanation:
Is dtrace simply a way of inserting wrapped, more-instrumented system calls to replace the standard ones, on the fly, perhaps using the same concepts as dynamic loaded libraries?
[I'm accustomed to memory debuggers that work by substituting their own heavily instrumented wrapper versions of malloc() for the vanilla ones.]
only plays The Ford Station
There's a problem.
The information to which people are exposed (the largest media outlets) is typically devoid of meaningful rational content and unbiased evaluation of different alternatives.
Either you have to open up media access so that people can be exposed to many more opinions, or else you have to educate people early enough to exercise some effort to exercise responsibility to actively go and seek out alternative sources of information.
Or else accept that we are mostly a herd.
Here at the Coca-Cola sponsored high school we're quite content with dumb-enough kids "learning" to purchase our products from the TV that we control.
if you want to develop with QT and the Windows platform you must purchase
Even for developing?
What if the developed code is used exclusively by the developer and no one else?
It would seem to make more sense if the commercial license were required upon distribution of QT/Windows code, not development of the application.
who fought so vigorously in the past against such "Communist" practices
Right wing ideologues are seduced by authoritarianism just as much as the old Stalinist left ever was.
What the right really feared about "Communism" was the attack on property rights of people who owned a lot of property; the concern for civils rights was a facade.
Now, with the Republicans abandoning fiscal conservatism (cf. latest budget deficit numbers), it's hard to find much of anything left to like about them anymore.
The problem is that a nuclear weapon needs an enormous number of things to be 'just so' before it'll go bang.
And then it's basically all done. Except waiting for the radioactive dust to clear.
But the Bio Energizer Bunny keeps going and going and going.
A biological organism that can replicate will keep eating and replicating until the world is depleted of food sources, or it becomes a food source for something equally voracious, or it re-evolves into something different.
Humanity has been one of the most significant organisms to cover the globe lately, mostly due to intelligence and social organization. It would be most ironic if that same intelligence and social organization gave rise to a new species, gray goo or whatever, that ultimately displaced humanity.
Nothing solves 'big company' ills quite like
actually being a little company.
Had Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson exercised a little more restraint in his emotional venting and the Justice Department actually gone through with a breakup into smaller companies that really compete, those companies, in aggregate, might well be doing much better than the whole of Microsoft is right now.
including hints of the port of OpenVMS to Itanium
I guess porting to the Alpha wasn't enough of a hint that they wanted to kill VMS:)
Now, of course, the Itanic is going down in a big way since Intel decided to go with ix86-64...
I'm only surprised they didn't port VMS to the i860.
making a fiscally responsible choice
That is key.
And the reality is that, very often, choosing Microsoft solutions are locally optimal. Given that you have an existing infrastructure of Microsoft products and given that most of your employees are familiar with these products (quirks and all), the incremental best next move is more Microsoft products.
And most decision makers are heavily swayed by the here and now and what the impact will be on the bottom line of next quarter's results.
But if you start to look at hidden costs in terms of downtime, of vendor lock-in, and the rate at which Microsoft will actually deliver those new products as part of your SA investment, the cost of extra dedicated servers, server admins, desktop support techs, etc., then the long term optimum is pointing away from Microsoft and towards free and open source software solutions.
It takes a courageous manager to risk a couple of quarters of adaptation and user retraining for the better long term solution.